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At the time, I hated using these things. Mac OS 9 would lock up unexpectedly (generally Windows wouldn't blue screen while simply typing up a document whereas these iMacs would just freeze, requiring you to stick a paperclip into a hole like ejecting a CD drive manually). The keyboard was terrible, mouse was worse and the speakers were only good to play notification dings.
This author of the article has some real rose-tinted glasses.
MacOS was just about as jank as Windows 9x by my recollection.
The screen was nice, the USB support was nice. I didn't hate the keyboard, though I was used to an IBM Model M so I hammered those keys...
It was such an iconic machine. Ironically, at the time I hated them. (I probably still wouldn't want to use one even now, but now I only have to look at pictures of them, and they admittedly are nice to look at.)
I had a friend in high school whose family had one of these in their living room, and it was running OS 9. It was practically useless, but I forget what he did on it. I seem to remember that it ran World of Warcraft, but now I'm questioning my memory if that was really possible or not.
I like iMac's colorful design. It really stood out from the beige-grey PC's back then. My dream would be to build a sleeper PC inside the iMac.
His family also got the first iMac running OS X, and that was such a beauty to behold. I mean, maybe the design wasn't as colorful or iconic as the G4 generation, but man that OS was sweet.
You could upgrade to OS X on the colorful ones, I installed 10.0 on release day and got an OS X tee shirt and wore it to school because what was I thinking. It was fun times. I remember having to open Emacs to make some system change to better support IRC in Ircle and I had no idea what I was doing but it was Unixy!
Did OS X even include emacs???
It did. I checked their opensource repo and it looks like they removed it in 10.15. The shell was also tcsh at the time and the terminal, I think, defaulted to black on white. Everything about it was unfamiliar to a Mac user, it felt like an old library Dynix system.
it looks like they removed it in 10.15
Things have really gone downhill
Love the way it looks. It's peak late 90s but I think it would be cool if apple revisited that style in some of their newer tech
This came out when I was still in elementary school. I remember at the time the computer guru people were like, "It's not a real computer, it doesn't even have a 3 1/2" floppy drive. How can it be a computer without a floppy disk?" And people bought into that sentiment because Apple of the 90s was a company with no new ideas that was almost dead.
From an LA Times article, "Wait, did I really say “no floppy”? I did. This is probably the biggest gamble. Third-party vendors will no doubt develop a floppy that will attach via one of the iMac’s universal serial bus ports for connecting peripheral devices. (USB is a successor to a range of ports used previously on PCs and Macs.) My guess is that Apple is wrong about home users--most will still want a floppy (or zip drive) and will have to buy an add-on."
I thought it was kind of neat to not have a floppy because even in those days 1.44MB was pathetically small and there were competing standards for a floppy replacement around 100-120MB range.
I think the biggest influence, besides killing off floppy drive was that this also killed beige PCs. Everybody shit on Apple for their new design but then in a few years they were all putting different colors on their cases and nobody had beige computers anymore.
I never got to use one until almost a decade later, in undergrad, where they were still in use at the kiosks for free internet in the student center. That's where I finally learned to despise the puck mouse.